• Molecular0079@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Nowadays you don’t even need a /boot unless you’re doing full disk encryption and I actually recommend keeping /boot on / if you’re doing BTRFS root snapshots. Being able to include your kernel images in your snapshots makes rollbacks painlessly easy.

    • mhz@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      UEFI forum made it a requirement for motherboard constructors (hp, dell, msi…) to make their UEFI implementation to be able to at least read fat(12/16/32) filesystems. That is why you need a fat(12/16/32) partition flagged ESP (efi system partition) for holding your boot files.

      So, I dont think you can do that unless you fall back to the old outdated BIOS or you have some *nix filesystem in your uefi implementation which I dont trust.

      • Molecular0079@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You’re only partially correct. /boot doesn’t have to also be your EFI partition. In fact, most distros by default will separate the two, with the EFI partition mounted at /boot/efi and /boot being a separate ext4 based partition. My suggestion is that, if you’re running BTRFS, you should merge /boot and / as one partition. You’re still free to have a FAT32-based EFI mounted at /boot/efi or better yet /efi.

        • yum13241@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I use systemd-boot and my mount point is /efi. /efi/EFI/ is where my bootloaders live.

          If I rollback to an old enough snapshot, I have to reinstall my kernels from a chroot. It’d be cool if I could get around that.

        • mhz@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          It has been a while since I used grub that I forgot tgat esp could only be used to hold the boot files residing on /boot/efi.

          • Molecular0079@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I am guessing you’re on systemd-boot? Yeah, one of the reasons why I hesitate to use it is how it requires EFI contain the kernel images. I am currently using refind.

            • mhz@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, I’m on systemd-boot, it requires the kernel to be located in the ESP partition which I mount in /boot, resulting in cleaner setup.